Like Bees to Honey. Caroline Smailes

      ~my heart.

      

      My mother used to tell all that I was a kind, a loving, a quick-witted child. She would describe how my eyes carried a mischievous sparkle that warmed her. When I was a child, I could do no wrong.

      But from an early age my feet would shuffle. I wanted to know more.

      

      My mother would tell me that from the moment I could I would toddle out of the front door and down the steep slope that led to the harbour. My mother would tell me about frantic searches and screaming relatives dashing around the city. My mother would say that soon they learned to run to the harbour, that I would always be found standing on the same bench, waving at the boats.

      And as I grew, my fascination with the atlas, the globe, the sphere, with the wide spaces and exotic names, grew too. No one could tell me of life off the island, no one had ever travelled to the distant, the bizarre-sounding shores.

      

      I was restless to roam.

      

      I longed for further than my island could give.

      

      And so, as soon as an opportunity arose, I asked.

      I asked my father if I could be educated away from the island, in England. Eventually, because I drilled and drained, my father agreed that I would travel, that I would be educated in the UK, but then I would return and marry a Maltese boy. I promised my father and then my mother that I would return. I promised them that they could choose my partner, I would agree to anything, to everything.

      

      I promised.

      

      My mother wept for twenty-eight nights.

      

      One month before my nineteenth birthday, I flew to Manchester airport, and then climbed into a taxi to Liverpool University.

      

      Four days later, I had found Matt.

      I can, without any hesitation, avow that within four days on English soil I had met the man whom I was convinced I would spend the rest of my life in love with. Within four days, I knew that I would not keep my pact with my father, with my mother and that in doing so, I would break my mother’s heart.

      As I was falling into Matt, my mother wrote to me. She said that when I left the island that ‘naqta’ qalbi’.

      

      ~I cut my heart, I lost hope.

      

      She knew.

      

      It was as if she could always see into my spirit and then into my mind. My mother gave up hope because she knew, just knew, that when I fell it would be totally, all or nothing. And so when I left Malta, my mother lost hope and now I realise that without hope, there is nothing.

      I lost my virginity to Matt. I lost my family too.

      I remember.

      

      ‘You make me lovesick,’ Matt said; he turned his naked back, away.

      

      ‘Is that bad?’ My fingers brushed his shoulder.

      

      ‘My heart is sick,’ he spoke and his shoulders began to quiver.

      

      ‘I don’t understand. What have I done?’ I feared the end of us. I remember that Matt turned to face me. We were squashed into a single bed, his student room, naked skin on skin.

      

      I had known him for five days.

      

      His fingers, his face, were covered in my scent.

      

      I remember.

      

      Matt stared into my eyes.

      

      I remember the intensity, the strength, the drowning.

      

      ‘I have fallen for you. I feel lovesick.’

      

      ‘You mean you feel love?’ I questioned.

      

      ‘More than that.’

      

      ‘Lovesick?’

      

      ‘Lovesick,’ Matt smiled.

      

      The lovesickness was mutual, but I never told him. Those words were his. The concept, the depth, the languishing in lovesick moods. They were claimed by Matt. He left me wishing that I could find the language to express the extreme emotion that he whipped within me.

      

      My sacrifice showed him what my tongue could never curl.

      I was naïve, perhaps dim. It was a tradition, a lesson, a belief, a thought that floated with my friends in Malta. There were rumours that if we went to the toilet immediately after or if we stood during sexual intercourse, then we would not find ourselves pregnant, it was our only control. I’d seen pregnant women, of course I had, but the connections that I made as a child didn’t quite fit. In Malta, we were told that babies were bought in shops or sometimes they came by boat. Pregnancy and sexual acts didn’t quite go together, somehow. A pregnant woman went on to buy a baby, not to deliver one, it made sense.

      

      As girls, we were also taught, through generations, that a sexual act outside of marriage would pollute all those who came into contact with it, it would lead to catastrophe. I knew that.

      Seven months after landing in England, I found out that I was pregnant. I never talked of having an abortion, my faith was strong, my love secure. Christopher was growing inside of me.

      

      I was naïve, uneducated in such matters. Within my family, sexual consequences were never discussed, not fully, not in practical terms. Pregnancy was masked. My mother had told me that I had arrived by boat.

      Matt and I decided to marry after the child was born, in love, not from duty.

      

      We decided that I would stop my studies and we decided that Matt would continue his. We would live together officially; we would move in somewhere, rent a flat.

      

      I was excited.

      

      I loved Matt.

      

      He thrilled my insides with words, with gestures, with his lovesickness. I wanted to grow old with him, happily.

      And so, I telephoned my parents.

      

      My father answered, he was so very thrilled to hear my voice.

      

      And then, I told him that I was with child. I told him that I had a baby growing within me and that I understood the sexual facts of life. I told him that everything made sense now, that my coming to them on a boat must have been a lie. I even laughed, ha ha ha.

      

      My father told me, ‘Inti di

unur g

al din il-familja. Minn issa, mhux se nqisek aktar b

ala binti.’

      ~you are a disgrace to this family. From now on, you are no longer my daughter.